Soft Skill Training III: Jumping off a cliff with confidence - how to make career transitions 6/27

According to a January 2016 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median tenure of US workers with their current employer was 4.2 years. It is very well known the median tenure is even shorter here in Silicon Valley. We may not only change employers a number of times, but we may even deviate away from our core occupation to endeavor in new ventures. How does one make such a daunting transition with confidence? Our guest speaker will share his career makeover experiences of how he transitioned from an engineer occupation at a hardware company to business development at a software company. This interesting and inspirational topic is part of the Soft Skill Training series hosted by CIE-SF this year.

Francis is the Sr. Director of Business Operations and Chief of Staff of the Storage and Availability Business Unit at VMware. He has been at VMware for about a year. Previously he spent almost 20 years in the Semiconductor industry at Altera (acquired by Intel) and Texas Instruments. He started his career as an engineer, got promoted to a design manager, transitioned his career to a business role, and took on various marketing and sales leadership roles before becoming a Vice President and General Manager of a $1B business. He has delivered speeches and presented a number of papers in key conferences, most recently at IEEE 5G Summit and previously at IEEE ISSCC and IEEE GLOBECOM. He has a number of ITU standard contributions for DSL and has 7 issued US patents. Francis holds an MBA and an MSEE from University of California at Berkeley, and a BSEE from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.